Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 28 | Page 64

CASE STUDY W What does your role entail and what are the company’s core objectives? How do you succeed in maintaining an efficient infrastructure? As Head of Infrastructure, I look after pretty much everything that goes up to the point where the user can log in, that includes Internet, networking, storage, compute and virtualisation. The company aims to provide analytical services to the mining industry. Can you describe the company’s infrastructure and how it works? A lot of hard work! We’ve got a really good team and what we’ve been doing in the last two years since I joined is going through a real modernisation of the infrastructure and maintaining it efficiently or effectively is basically down to our data fabric because you have to have your data where you need it otherwise there’s no point in having it. We are very centralised in Liverpool. We operate in roughly 30 countries and we provide almost all of our infrastructure over Citrix and everything is hosted on NetApp. So, by putting the best of breed technology in place, we’re able to put everything together and maintain it, so it’s about choosing your partners. 64 INTELLIGENTCIO How do you ensure that data centre operations run smoothly and how is the NetApp solution helping with this? NetApp is allowing us to have this flexibility so we make use of NetApp and of Veeam, it’s a great partnership. It allows us to failover, failback and if we did have any issues we go onto our secondary storage – a bit slower, but we’re not seeing any downtime in that respect. NetApp specifically is rock solid and there’s always innovation on tap which is really helping us to become more efficient. So, for example, with every ONTAP release we’re www.intelligentcio.com